On The Intrinsic Connection Between Being And Goodness

All things, insofar as they are, have goodness. This is because, for any existent thing whatsoever, to be is necessarily better than not being (regardless of whether a given existent thing consciously acknowledges this or is even capable of thinking about it at all). This goodness is partly a function of the fact that every existent thing inherently depends upon its having being in order to have any other good things.

Existing is, in the first place, the most foundational good. It is the good in which all other goods can even occur. All actual good things are existent things and we can only enjoy them if they exist and if we exist. Even our own personal excellences all require our own existences as their precondition and, furthermore, fulfilling our potential for an excellence essentially consists of existing in certain greater ways rather than in other lesser ways. All that is either intrinsically excellent or delightful to others about any existent thing is also a function of its way of existing, the form its existence takes.

I borrow Plato and Aristotle’s term “form” only with the proviso that it needs always to be read in ways that are consistent with modern biology. If you think it is impossible or unwise to retain form or essence language given the facts known by modern biology, leave your objection in the comments and I will happily explore my reasons for thinking they can be compatible and complementary ways of understanding the natural world and how philosophical recourse to this metaphysical language need not lead to any confusions about the proper biological nomenclature or be inconsistent with recognition of biological processes.

As my first preemptive defenses against foreseeable objections: I only see biological “forms” as the contingent results of natural selection, not as in any way immaterial essences given directly to beings by a divine agency. By forms I also do not mean to imply that any non-biologically-based, distinguishable metaphysical, non-physical thing is at work in natural entities making them take the shapes they have. The “forms” things have are purely functions of physical, chemical, and biological processes. There are also no strict formal constraints that prevent evolution by which one species splits into two.

By the term “form” in general, I only refer to recurrent, scientifically specifiable patterns of organization that make different entities classifiable as belonging to common groups, as essentially the same kinds of things.

In other words, I refer to the fact that, for whatever physical, chemical, or biological reasons are explanatory in any given case, there are patterns of being which occur the same in more than one entity, such that each of those entities can be rightly and accurately referred to as the same “kinds” or “forms” of things and expected as such to have either identical properties and behaviors or to have characteristically similar ones, which can be, or already are, scientifically specifiable.

Every “form” is a way to exist and, therefore, if what I said at the beginning is correct, a possible way to be good. Now a given being may or may not completely fulfill its formal possibility for existing excellently according to its kind. Every being, essentially, might more or less fully realize the potential which its nature gives it. It may become a more or less excellent instance of its kind. The more that a thing fulfills its potential, the more it actualizes its nature, and the more it becomes that thing.

For a simple example, all humans have some musicality which gives us each at least some potential to be musicians. The more that one of us fulfills the excellences of music performance, the more one becomes an excellent musician. In Aristotelian language (while not endorsing the superseded physics with which he interpreted the terms), to turn a potentiality into an actuality is to realize a form.

The more a thing does the characteristic things of its kind, the more it becomes in actuality, and not just potentially, a thing of that kind. The more excellently you do those characteristic things which are fit for your kind of being, the more closely, ideally, and powerfully you embody its formal ideal. And, in some significant sense, this makes you more that sort of thing.

In a certain real sense, the degree to which a musician plays according to ideals of perfect musicianship, the more she is a musician and the less adequately she approaches the ideal of perfect musicianship, the less she is a musician. This intuition is captured when we praise a good musician by saying “she is quite a musician” or criticize a bad musician by saying, “she isn’t much of a musician”.

What we are saying in the latter example is that what she does functions less as musicianship the further it gets from being an instance of ideal musicianship and she herself is less of a musician to that extent. And vice versa in the former case.

So, we fulfill a potential to do something not only by doing the formal motions involved in doing that thing but, more importantly, by doing that thing in ideal ways. We actualize ourselves as musicians not just by plucking on strings or blowing into horns but by effectively expressing musical skills and by effectively creating instances of music which excellently do whatever music characteristically does.

And this does not go just for being a musician of course but it goes for being a whole human being. The more we actualize our potentials the more we fully realize our human nature by more closely approaching an ideal of human perfection and existing more fully as human.

While we are all, of course, minimally human by virtue of belonging to the species and doing human activity to at least some minimums of characteristic human excellence, we can more fully realize our humanity and more fully exist as humans to the extent that we realize our characteristic excellences. These excellences are our virtues, be they moral, intellectual, or technical.

In some real way, having only the crudest and most rudimentary musical abilities, as I do for example, and rarely expressing any of them, means I am less fully existing as a human being than, say, an alternate version of me who had all my own cultivated powers and expressions of them but also added to them the fulfillment of the ideal of musicality.

In this sort of picture we see how being can be equated with goodness. The extent that I do something excellent is the extent to which I am a certain kind of being and the extent to which I lack an excellence is the extent to which I am not a certain kind of being.

There are some excellences which I can never have because of constraints I get from being human. I can only be excellent in terms of the powers germane to my kind of being and in terms of the possible complex recombinations of power permitted within the constraints of my kind of being. The degree to which I fail to excellently realize those powers is the extent to which I fail to ideally be my kind of being.

Just as when a heart fails to pump blood, it fails to realize the very functionality which biologically defines it as a heart and so fails any longer to, in effect, be a heart, we can say that:

When I fail to philosophize well, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not a philosopher.

When I fail to act morally well, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not a moral human being.

When I fail to be a moral human being, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not excellent according to central human powers.

When I fail to be excellent according to central human powers, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not an ideal human being.

When I fail to be an ideal human being, I am, functionally speaking, to that extent not a human being.

Of course, the qualifiers “functionally speaking” and “to that extent” are crucial to all of the above distinctions. Fortunately, by our very nature, before we die we never fail completely to fulfill our powers that make us human and until we die we can have the structures that, even when temporarily not functional, make for formal humanity. Only once dead, when we completely stop functioning as human beings do and we lose all our human structures, do we completely stop being human.

Of course there are many questions my account raises. I already have a first follow up in the post How Our Morality Realizes Humanity and I hope to answer what I expect to be numerous questions, challenges and objections in posts which find their inspiration, shape, and focus from your thoughts.

Your Thoughts?

The considerations spelled out in the above post should offer a greater context and justification for the ideas in the following, roughly logically ordered, posts. Listed below are some of the most salient posts I have written on problems in value theory, metaethics, moral psychology, practical ethics, and normative moral theory. There are a lot of them but you do not need to read them all to understand any of them whose titles interest you in particular. So don’t avoid all of them for fear you cannot read all of them.

Dr. Daniel Fincke has his PhD in philosophy from Fordham University and spent 11 years teaching in college classrooms. He wrote his dissertation on Ethics and the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. On Camels With Hammers, the careful philosophy blog he writes for a popular audience, Dan argues for atheism and develops a humanistic ethical theory he calls “Empowerment Ethics”. Dan also teaches affordable, non-matriculated, video-conferencing philosophy classes on ethics, Nietzsche, historical philosophy, and philosophy for atheists that anyone around the world can sign up for. (You can learn more about Dan’s online classes here.) Dan is an APPA (American Philosophical Practitioners Association) certified philosophical counselor who offers philosophical advice services to help people work through the philosophical aspects of their practical problems or to work out their views on philosophical issues. (You can read examples of Dan’s advice here.) Through his blogging, his online teaching, and his philosophical advice services each, Dan specializes in helping people who have recently left a religious tradition work out their constructive answers to questions of ethics, metaphysics, the meaning of life, etc. as part of their process of radical worldview change.